How to clean and disinfect your Android smartphone

You spend all day with your phone, setting it down on tables, chairs, public benches, bathroom counters, and even more unsightly places. Then there's the more visible grime that gets on or in your phone from dropping it in the dog park, leaving it in your sweaty jean pockets, or letting your child pour Cheerio dust all over it. Phones get dirty easily, but thankfully getting them clean again can be easy, too, if you know what to use.

Products used in this guide

What NOT to use when cleaning your phone

Lysol or Clorox wipes might seem like an easy way to clean grime off a phone, but fight this instinct with every phone-loving fiber of your being. Bleach, vinegar, alcohol, and most harsh disinfectant chemicals can clean the sides and back of an Android phone, but those chemicals need to stay far away from the glass front of your phone (and glass back if you have one), as they will eat away at the oleophobic coating that your phone uses to help fight fingerprint smudges.

Compressed air can be useful since it blows dust out of hard-to-reach places. However, you need to be very, very careful when using it with a phone as compressed air can damage pinhol mics and other components quite easily with their precise, pressurized air blasts.

How to clean your Android phone by hand

Take your phone out of its case. If the case is safe to wash, give it a good rinse in warm water and then let it air dry.

Using the felt-tipped swabs in the Phone Cleaning Kit (or Q-Tips, if you've got the time to whittle the tips to points) to gently swab around the earpiece, speaker grills, and various ports on your phone.

Be careful when swabbing the USB-C port not to leave any fibers behind or dislodge any pieces inside the port. If a swab doesn't fit in your USB-C port, use the small brush included in the Phone Cleaning Kit instead.

Take a Zeiss Mobile Screen wipe and wipe down the screen and body of the phone.

If any streaks remain after using the Zeiss wipe, use a microfiber cloth (or a clean kitchen towel) to wipe the screen clear of streaks.

Once the phone and case are both completely dry, re-apply your case.

If you don't regularly use your headphone port — or just tend to acquire more dirt and lint in your ports than normal — consider investing in a set of dust plugs to help keep your port clear and clean when not charging. Also, if you'd like to cut down on grime accumulated on your screen when you use your phone, put your phone down for a few minutes and go wash your grimy hands before getting back to browsing Reddit.

The easiest way to disinfect your phone

There are solutions you can make by diluting isopropyl alcohol that can disinfect a phone, but again, you generally want to avoid alcohol and vinegar as they'll eat through your oleophobic coating. What's a girl to disinfect with instead? UV! Ultraviolet lights can kill bacteria and disinfect your phone with just a few minutes inside a doll-sized tanning bed.

There are a few versions of these UV phone baths out there, but the one I find the most practically sized and long-lasting is the PhoneSoap. It's roughly the size of hardback novel, features UV lights in the lid and base, and when you put your phone inside, it bathes your phone in germ-killing UV lights. Then the unit starts cleaning and the lightning bolt on the top of the unit lights up. When the light turns off, your phone is clean and you can take it out and be on your way.

I like to bathe my phone and case separately, so that no grime can hide under the cracks and crevices of the case, but you can stick your phone in the case and kill all of the surface bacteria on your phone. If you're someone who tweets on the toilet — or knocks out a few rounds of a match-three game, like me — consider investing in a Phone Soap and running your phone through it at least once a week. I also run my house keys through it every few weeks.

Cleaning kit essentials

There are a lot of different products out there you can employ to clean a phone, and no one single item is absolutely required to clean yours. These are the products that have worked best for us, but you may also have products like these sitting around your house already.

Ara Wagoner

Ara Wagoner is a Writer at Android Central. She themes phones and pokes Google Play Music with a stick. When she's not writing help and how-to's, she's off dreaming about Disney and singing show tunes. If you see her without headphones, RUN. You can follow her on Twitter at @arawagco.